You have arrived at Dr. Barnett’s Dealing with Ambiguity website. The purpose of this site is to enlighten, explain, and explore when and how to clearly define and use marketing concepts – more specifically the logic embedded in those and all business concepts – in a way that addresses the uncertainty always present when projecting the outcomes of any business decision or set of decisions.

David W. Nylen’s Marketing Decision-Making Handbook (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1990) presented a ground-breaking approach to understanding and applying marketing knowledge: the principles of marketing are valuable, not because they are hypothetical theories but because they are logical tried and true “rules of thumb.”

Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity

Sigmund Freud (1920)

There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words

Thomas Reid (1785)